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posted by n1 on Monday May 15 2017, @02:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-colonial-era dept.

John Timmer at Ars Technica reports:

So, why Titan? The two closer destinations, the Moon and Mars, have atmospheres that are effectively nonexistent. That means any habitation will have to be extremely robust to hold its contents in place. Both worlds are also bathed in radiation, meaning those habitats will need to be built underground, as will any agricultural areas to feed the colonists. Any activities on the surface will have to be limited to avoid excessive radiation exposure.

Would anyone want to go to a brand-new world just to spend their lives in a cramped tunnel? Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest the answer will be "no." Titan, in contrast, offers a dense atmosphere that shields the surface from radiation and would make any structural failures problematic, rather than catastrophic. With an oxygen mask and enough warm clothing, humans could roam Titan's surface in the dim sunlight. Or, given the low gravity and dense atmosphere, they could float above it in a balloon or on personal wings.

The vast hydrocarbon seas and dunes, Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest, would allow polymers to handle many of the roles currently played by metal and wood. Drilling into Titan's crust would access a vast supply of liquid water in the moon's subsurface ocean. It's not all the comforts of home, but it's a lot more of them than you'd get on the Moon or Mars.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 15 2017, @03:05PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 15 2017, @03:05PM (#510047)

    Yeah, but isn't that part of the OP's point about Venus? Good luck mining for mineral resources on Titan, where digging in the surface will just get you frozen methane and eventually water. There's no mineral resources there to speak of that I know of. So instead of going there, where it's far away, dark, and cold, you might as well build a cloud city on Venus. Sure, there's no mineral resources that can be feasibly extracted, but that's no different than Titan.

    And at least on Venus, if you can ever figure out how to get remote-control mining equipment to survive the hellish surface temperatures and pressures, then you could potentially mine the surface. (I know, it's really not feasible.) Not so for Titan.

    But yeah, if you're looking for mineral resources, Moon and Mars make some sense, though IMO it makes much more sense to capture and mine asteroids. We wouldn't even have to go very far, since there's plenty of asteroids that cross Earth orbit. And the Moon is very close too, though it's questionable how valuable its mineral resources would be. This Mars stuff makes little sense economically compared to these.

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